Description
Book SynopsisIn
SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows h
Trade Review“As we still come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic, Belinda Kong’s
SARS Stories provides a powerful testament to the ways in which cultural discourse—fiction, film, and digital media—shape our understanding of pandemic narratives. In the process, Kong reveals the often tenuous line between the truths conveyed through ‘fiction’ and the lies that sometimes haunt the ‘facts.’” -- Michael Berry, author of * Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign *
“As our contemporary pandemic commonsense swings from jingoism to denialism, reading Belinda Kong’s incredibly learned and daring book has been not just enlightening but, dare I say, therapeutic. Kong has taught me to think anew about pandemic epistemologies in relation to race, empire, and power while giving name to my own desire for ‘pandemic prosociality.’ Written with warmth, curiosity, and verve,
SARS Stories will speak to anyone and everyone who has tried to make sense of the past several years of pandemic life.” -- Sunny Xiang, author of * Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Pandemic Ordinariness: Epidemic Romances and Female Sentiments 33
2. Pandemic Humor: Digital Prosociality for the Epidemic Socius 77
3. Pandemic Resilience: Deextinction and the Hong Kong Cantophone 112
4. Pandemic First Patients: Deperilizing the Anglophone SARS Archive 180
Afterword 238
Notes 241
Bibliography 267
Index 285
